Art in The Age of No-Privacy

I was just looking through a few sites I'd bookmarked recently in order to put up links to them here when I realised all of them had a unifying thread. They were all about the way Internet and surveillance technologies (current and near-future) are eroding away our privacy and freedoms. It's good to see artists (writers, comic artists and animators in this case) tackling these issues that really don't get as much attention in the press as they should. Anyway, here goes.

Online science-fiction magazine Futurismic has a great story up by Mark Ward. It's called Cycle Thieves and it's a deft blend of noir-mystery style cyberpunk and Internet-generation concerns about pervasive social technologies. Very nice and it's apparently his 2nd story, which makes him a ery promising writer indeed.

Wired Magazine's February issue has a nice write-up about the uber-cool artist Paul Pope's upcoming Batman story- Batman: Year 100. I love the man's work- his graphich novel 100%, a character centred science-fiction story filled with beautiful dialogue and even more beautiful art, was just brilliant. So I'm rather looking forward to his take on the Batman myth- set in 2039, Batman: Year 100 posits the character as the last bastion of freedom in a dystopian police state. Which is a bit similar to Frank Miller's take on the character in The Dark Knight Strikes Back, his sequel to the seminal Dark Knight Returns, but I think that given the state of America today (cough*Patriot Act*cough) it's a scenario well worth revisiting. Paul Pope's stated in interviews that he wants depict Batman as a sort of escape artist, fighting the powers that be with dangerous, acrobatic acts of civil disobedience. Whoa, apparently the comic came out last week. Time for me to hit the comics shop.

Animation blog Cartoon Brew linked to a very nice British short animated film titled Welcome To Glaringly. The quality of the linked Quicktime video isn't the best, but the animation itself is gorgeous- utilizing a blocky, pixel-artish look to great effect. This wryly funny short film posits a scenario where video footage from a public surveillance camera is wildly out-of-context, to hilarious (for the audience, anyway) results. The underlying message here, I suppose, is that due to the very nature of public surveillance, it's hard to put any context to such footage and it's necessary to take whatever those cameras see with a grain of salt.